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73.
"Jimmy! Maribel!"
Jack ran from abandoned conference room to abandoned conference room shouting their names, but he got no answer. The vast, tubular glass hallway with its futuristic glowing neon rings was silent. Reality and fantasy had meshed as giant mushrooms grew all around. There were round ones, tall ones, even cubic ones big enough to swallow Jack if he got close.
Then, behind a stairwell, Jack glimpsed a brief hint of motion. He ran toward the stairs, only to see Jimmy's fleet figure running away. Quick, like a shadow, the child ran. There was something odd about him. His face looked dark, as if dusted with war paint. "Jimmy, I won't hurt you! Where is your cousin?"
The boy stopped. He turned around and stood very rigidly and seriously. "Are you really Mr. Simon?"
"Yes! The mushrooms haven't gotten me. What about you?" As he walked toward Jimmy, another figure stepped out from a huge flower pot across the hall. Maribel. His heart skipped a beat. Same rigid posture and dark face. Staring eyes. He stopped, wondering if they'd blow black air in his face and stick tubes down his neck.
To his surprise, both children started laughing and dancing up and down. "Yay, we're going to be saved!" They ran and hugged him before he could cautiously back away.
"Let me get this straight," he said, "You aren't mushrooms, and I'm not one. Is that right?"
He squatted down, and they hugged him. They felt warm and normal. "How did you survive that crash?"
Maribel said: "Who knows? We were buckled in together, and the left side crashed, hard, killing our pilot. Poor man. He was oozing…" She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the horror.
Jack hugged them close. "We're not out of the woods yet. I came in a tiny one-man airplane that may not even carry one of you on my lap. If I try to take you out one at a time, and if we crash, we'd really be in mushroom soup down there on the street with those hideous things walking around."
Jimmy grabbed Jack's collar in a death grip. "We saw a couple of them walking by earlier today, down on the street. They are soooo gross. This guy looked like his back was crawling with huge snails or something."
Jack said: "Look, let's stick together. Flying you out one by one is a bad idea. Whichever of you I come back for would have died of fright by then. What we want to do is get over into the Hyatt and up to the 40th floor. That's as high as it goes. We should be safe until they can rescue us, maybe right off the roof."
Taking the two children by the hand, he walked in the middle as they headed north through the whispering glass corridor. They stopped several times, thinking they heard something moving up ahead, but it was probably just a gust of wind hitting a door someplace, and sending gusts shivering through the building. It was eerie to be alone in this vast structure capable of comfortably handling many thousands of people, probably tens of thousands.
Across the street they did see a shadowy brown figure moving beyond the mushroom-overgrown hulk of three abandoned red trolley cars. The figure moved quickly, as if it were hunting something.
Wind kicked up outside, coming from the south, and the sky started to glow red as if evening were coming early.
They made a run for it from the north end of the Convention Center, across the mushroom-encrusted concrete plaza, past the Marriott with its twin towers, in order to reach the Hyatt.
What a fantasy scene! In the middle of the debris-littered street stood several mushrooms 40, 50 feet tall. They had developed cellulose cell walls, like trees. Their stems had become tree trunks, and black spores rained down. The trolley tracks were completely blocked by a stalked puffball whose fruiting body was as big as one of those giant concrete mixers mounted on the back of a truck. As they looked, its top had an open black hole from which a constant series of puffs emitted clouds of spores. Deadly looking bright green mushrooms stood everywhere with something dagger-like about their streamlined caps. There were round white ones with red spots, and boxy red ones with white spots. There were mushrooms big as cars with long trailing fronds. There were grotesque things resembling dead men's fingers and shrunken heads and medusa's hair, and all manner of nightmarish apparitions.
The man and two children were insignificant little life forms running across an empty concrete plaza, in front of a great abandoned hotel, and then up the ramp to the main entrance of the Hyatt. As they cautiously entered through the glass doors, Jack looked back. He saw a brown snail back running toward them from behind the trolley.
"We've been spotted!" Jack cried. Together, they ran into the lobby. He glanced back and the thing was still running diagonally across the street toward them with its trailing gill slit covers or fins or whatever they were flapping in the wind. It ran powerfully on thick legs, and its powerful arms terminated in clenched fists much bigger than Jack's.
Maribel looked as if she were ready to start screaming again. Jimmy punched elevator buttons. For a moment they stood in a time warp in the magnificent lobby. And magnificent it was, emblematic of a new age that seemed to have started in wonderment and was going dramatically sour as had most previous dramatic ages in history. The lobby had been designed to dwarf the onlooker with spectacle and lighting. Huge chandeliers like those on the Titanic hung down; one could almost imagine the deep, cold sea water swirling through its ornate rows of pearls. The lobby was a cathedral in dark wood—oak, mahogany, ceramic, fake, plastic, who cared. Its square pillars were the size of elevator shafts and tastefully paneled. Clerks manning the desk had been dwarfed by huge murals and by lights big as elevator cages and resembling hourglass fantasies. Everything had been made bigger than life, as if to sweep the functional harshness and minimalism of the century of Hitler and Stalin and related ogres into the dustbin of history.
Now the lobby was an underwater landscape of fungi. Thin, tall ones on wavy red stalks reached almost to the ceiling. Globular blue and green ones seemed to float in midair on spiderweb-like attachments. A thing that looked like a lamp stood in a corner. In fact, half the mushrooms they saw here glowed in the dark. Bioluminescence had found its need, its evolutionary calling, a switch had been dripped in the DNA accelerated by the Yellow Spray, and here was a lobby more fantastic than ever.
Maribel screamed her high, thin scream that seemed capable of cutting through glass—the door flung open and the grisly looking gill monster came charging toward them. Its black tongue already stuck out as if anticipating the taste of them. The floor shook with its pounding feet.
The elevator rumbled open. Jack snatched the kids into it. Jimmy and Maribel hammered away at all the buttons, and the door shut just as the gill man's weight slammed against it. The kids were thrown down at the impact and Jack had to brace himself as the cage rocked, but the elevator was on its way up. "You pressed all the buttons!" Jack exclaimed. "It's going to stop at every floor!"
Maribel screamed again, this time a series of piercing alarms, one for every exhaled breath. Jack put his hand over her mouth and said: "You're going to hyperventilate and pass out."
Jimmy tore open a metal box and pointed to the controls there. The door rumbled open and went ding!
Maribel slammed her palm on the button for the 40th floor.
They heard the pounding of the gill man's feet coming up the stairs just on the other side of the wall. The door burst open, and the gill man came flying across the floor.
The elevator door slowly started to shut. The gill man, who had skidded across the fungus-coated floor and had started to run the wrong way down the hall, turned with an audible snarl and came charging directly at them. Again it slammed against the door just as the cage started rising.
The elevator rose slowly and steadily. "I disabled the local access," Jimmy said, "and put it on emergency override. It's going to shoot right to the top."
"Great," Jack said, "but it's not shooting. It's whispering slowly along the way my grandma used to drive."
"I don't hear it outside anymore," Jimmy said.
Gravely, Maribel said: "I hear it in the stairwell next to us. It's running ahead of us."
Jack looked up at the slowly moving floor-number lights. If only he had his Glock, or at least a baseball bat. They heard a thud far above. The cage began to shake.
"It's getting into the shaft above us," Jimmy whispered.
Maribel reached into the emergency box and yanked out the wires to the override mechanism. Jimmy shouted: "Lobster skull! What have you done?"
"No, she's on to something," Jack said. "It's all timing now, or we are dead ducks."
Maribel pressed the button for the 35th Floor, and the elevator stopped. Just then, a heavy weight smashed down on top of the car. The door opened, and Jack pushed the children out. Pressing L for Lobby, he stepped out. The ceiling of the car exploded in sheets of torn plastic and wood splinters as the gill man threw himself with superhuman strength through the service door without bothering to open it. He hung for a second in the opening, and needed to ease the sensitive gills and fins on his back through. In that moment, the door just rumbled shut and the elevator started down. Jack heard a series of explosive bangs as the thing hit the walls with its fists in a rage. It was smart, still having some human DNA as well as inherited memories and instincts stolen directly out of the brains of so many in the chain of past victims—stolen the very electro-bio-chemical shapes of electrons that formed images and memories and snatched them electro-bio-magnetically into its chain of predecessor fungi. It was smart and might or might not remember how to stop an elevator. Jack took the children's hands, and together they ran up the concrete stairwell. Even here, it smelled of earth and there was a light powdering of fungal growth, like white moss in places red and green like peach fuzz.
There was a bar on the 40th floor, from where one could look down on the Gaslamp District and Petco Park and the harbor as if looking into a box of toys. Even aircraft carriers looked like matchbox toys from here. As they ran past the elevators on the 40th floor, Jack saw the numbers moving upward: 10, 11, 12…slowly, but surely.
"Hide in the ladies' room," he ordered, "lock yourselves in."
He ran to the bar, grabbed three or four bottles of rum and vodka and some matches and paper napkins. He ran back to the elevator doors and put his burden down. He heard the smashing sounds in the shaft below as the enraged gill man roared for his victims.
28, 29, 30… read the flashing floor number lights.
Jack grabbed a fine table. He smashed it on the ground and against the walls in a rage of his own. When he had one leg left, he used that to pry the elevator doors apart a few inches.
34, 35, 36…
Rip the cap off, stuff paper in, light, and drop the first bomb.
He glimpsed the dark brown shape of the gilled and finned creature sitting on top of the elevator already reaching out with one crusty, shining hand. It spotted the first bottle dropping and roared in fear as it dove down into the elevator. Perfect. The elevator burst into flame. The gill man roared and smashed the walls with its fists.
Jack dropped the next two flaming molotov cocktails one by one so that they fell into the elevator. The screaming stopped but the pounding continued. A wall of heat, and a smell like burning—something disgusting, like barrels of flaming spit or toe jam—rose up and almost knocked Jack unconscious. He had one more bomb to go, and he dropped that in to the car as it rose above the 39th floor. As he reeled back from the heat and smell, he caught a glimpse of the trapped thing writhing while it burned—and still it looked up with eyes filled with hate as they slowly dimmed.
The elevator mechanism went into failsafe mode, and the mechanical automata took over. The elevator stopped rising and rapidly descended toward the bowels of the hotel underneath the lobby trailing a shaftful of fire and dead-gillman smoke.
Jack lurched away from the elevators and gathered heavy tables to push into the entrance and block the elevator shafts. Working manically, he chained the stairwell doors together so they couldn't be opened from outside. Pouring himself a glass of fine scotch and a tall glass of ice water, he rummaged until he found some pretzels and then sat at the window overlooking the fantasmagoria far below. It all looked so normal.
The kids poked their heads out of the bathroom. "Is it gone?"
He nodded. "It's dead. Burned up. Gone to hell. You can come over now and sit with me. Maybe we'll rest a bit and then I'll take a look on the roof.
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